


Don't Bite Me

by Izupie



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: (I can't believe that's a tag lmao), Banter is their love language your honour, Everyone is Alive Except Georgie Denbrough, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mentioned Maturin | The Turtle, Mutual Pining, Phone Conversations, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Werewolf Richie Tozier, magic pomeranian bites
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:16:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27662576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Izupie/pseuds/Izupie
Summary: Of course the first person Richie's going to call when he's been bitten by a dog is going to be Eddie. Not just because of his painfully pathetically long crush on his best friend, though, but because the dog bit him in a dream, so his hand definitely should not be bleeding...
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 12
Kudos: 68





	Don't Bite Me

**Author's Note:**

> *slaps my own head* this bad boy can fit so many Werewolf Richie AUs in it
> 
> I had so much fun making this - I was sat at my desk at 1am laughing at the dialogue that I was writing and just having a blast with it.
> 
> Im not sure whether I'll continue this, because I feel like Werewolf Richie is such a niche and I need to stop, but I hope you have fun reading this too

“So, hypothetically, say I had a… friend… who got bit by a dog-”

_“-You got bit by a dog?”_

“Wha- No, Eds, fuck- weren’t you listening? My friend got bit by a dog. Hypothetically.”

“Richie- _I swear to-_ how stupid do you think I am? When has that line worked for anyone ever?”

Richie peered into the tiny sink at the red still dripping down his fingers from the wound on his hand. There was a pile of bloodied tissues next to him and the wad he was currently pressing onto the bite really needed changing too. “Oh, shit,” Richie cursed loudly, as his cell phone nearly slipped out from where he'd wedged it between his ear and his shoulder.

“What?”

“I nearly lost my phone down the plane toilet.” He snorted a laugh. “Imagine someone’s walking around down there, minding their own business, and a phone drops out of the sky on them.”

“That’s not how plane toilets work!” Eddie shot back in a clipped, familiar tone. Richie would happily argue with him for the test of the flight. Even with the whole bleeding out into a tiny plastic sink thing.

“Aw, it’s not?”

“Of course not, dipshit, otherwise every time someone flushes it, it would just-” Eddie took a deep breath and Richie reached for a handful of new toilet paper to press onto his hand. “You’re distracting me. You need to apply pressure to the wound.”

“I am. I’m like, pressing a load of toilet paper on it. But it won’t stop bleeding.”

“It’s probably gonna get infected… shit, what if the dog had rabies, have you had a rabies shot in the last year?”

Richie opened his mouth.

“Of course you haven’t. Okay, just don’t think about rabies. Dog bites get infected easy because of all the bacteria in their mouths, so you need to wash it. That’ll encourage the bleeding, but you need to make sure the wound is clean. Then you’ve got to dry it and just keep the pressure on.”

It was soothing to hear Eddie’s voice in his ear, and despite the bite (that had started to feel like it was burning – that can’t be a good sign) Richie was always so happy to talk to him. He was hunched over a plane sink with his cell phone jammed onto his ear and piles of bloodied toilet paper around him, but he was smiling because he was talking to Eddie Kaspbrak and he was being a helpful but bossy little shit. God he’d got it bad. “Wash it, dry it, pressure,” Richie repeated, “aye, aye, cap’n doctor K.”

“As soon as I pick you up, we’re going straight to the hospital.”

Richie began following Eddie’s instructions as he ran his hand under the tap, wincing as the burning sensation increased and the red freely flowed down the drain.

“Wait a minute- if you’re already on the plane… how’d you get bitten by a dog?”

Richie grabbed a handful of clean, dry toilet paper and patted the wound gently, as he thought about how he was going to dance around a way of explaining what happened. “Uh…” Then he pressed down hard, applying as much pressure as he could, and hissed at the stab of pain.

“Hey, are you okay?” Eddie’s concern came loud and clear through the phone and it was so startling in its utter sincerity that it made Richie want to pour his goddamn heart out to him with, _‘Well I got bit by a dog but that’s not the problem, I’m not okay because I’ve been so in love with you that it hurts since we were thirteen fucking years old.’_

Instead Richie just nodded and realised that he wouldn’t be able to see that, so he said, “I just nodded.”

Eddie let out a huff and Richie smiled at the soft sound.

“God you’re so distracting-”

 _No,_ you’re _so distracting._

“-but, really, how’d you get a dog bite on a plane, Rich? Did one bite you before you got on?”

And there was his out. He could agree to that, and it would be fine. Eddie would never know. (Though it would probably be a little hard to keep up the lie if he got any kind of magical related disease or curse or something, since he didn’t consider rabies to be a legitimate concern from a bite he received through some magical bullshit that he thought he had left behind a year ago.) But maybe he was tired of tying himself up in a web of lies all the time with Eddie, because he was always so careful to mask everything with a joke or a punchline. Didn’t he deserve as much honesty as he was willing to give sometimes – about this at least?

“Richie?”

And oh, there was the word that always brought him to his knees. The word he heard whispered on bloodied lips. Whimpered into a cave. Hands up to a blood-stained spike, piercing a chest – before waking up sobbing in his bed alone.

 _It_ was dead.

It was fucking dead. And Eddie was alive.

Richie took a deep breath, inflating his lungs as far as they could go, and let it all out at once. “I’ve been having dreams.”

“What?”

“The fucking- the Deadlights or whatever- when I was caught in them I… saw things.” Richie was gripping onto his wounded hand so hard his knuckles were white.

_You died._

“And I’ve been having, I don’t know, some weird kind of messed up dreams on and off since then.”

For a moment Eddie didn’t reply and then it burst out of him in a pure unfiltered explosion of Kaspbrak rage through the phone, “You didn’t think to tell us this sooner? What if that means- like what if It isn’t really dead? ‘Messed up’ dreams? What kind of messed up? Richie, what the fuck- why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you tell _me?_ ”

(Richie could imagine the pacing and the hand movements that went with the ranting, but it didn’t make him feel any less guilty.)

“Well I mean, I’m coming to stay at your apartment for a couple of weeks, so like, at some point I’d have woken you up with the screaming or the sobbing, or the pathetic party of both at the same time, so it would probably have come up then…”

There was another long pause and Richie expected this to be because of Eddie rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“So anyway,” Richie continued, “I fell to sleep as soon as the plane took off.”

“Of course,” Eddie sighed.

Richie thought he sounded sad. But he supposed if he found out that Eddie was keeping a secret like that from him, he’d be pretty pissed off and upset about it too. (It’s not the only secret he’s keeping from Eddie, but it’s the only one he’s willing to ever let past his lips.)

“Well this dream started similarly to the others… but…” Richie hesitated, remembering what had set the dream off its usual course of watching Eddie die in that cave – he’d so very nearly told him that he loved him. It had been on the tip of his tongue, but he’d swallowed it down. Instead he’d told a weak joke and they’d both smiled, even though Eddie was bleeding out under his hands, and the whole dream had gone black. “There was a turtle,” he said eventually, remembering the darkness and the tiny point of light in it. “Which was weird.”

“You’re having magic dreams and the weird thing is that there was a turtle?”

“Well yeah, ‘cause there’s never been one there before. They tend to all go the same way.”

“So… the turtle bit you?”

“What, no. The turtle didn’t fucking bite me. Jesus. It turned into a dog, and the dog bit me.”

Richie could hear Eddie sit down.

“It was one of those tiny fluffy demon things. It told me I had to stop hiding who I am and…” _Let myself be seen._ “I don’t know, some other weird stuff, so I reached out to it and it fuckin’ bit me, man.”

“The… turtle… that turned into a… dog… and bit you… told you, that you had to stop hiding who you are?”

“Yep.” Richie snorted a laugh and lifted the toilet paper on his wound carefully, to peek underneath. The bleeding had stopped. He finally reached up to adjust his glasses and released his phone from the gap between his neck and shoulder to hold it up to his ear with his good hand. “But I’ve always been a Trashmouth, and I’ll always be a Trashmouth and I don’t think anyone can say that I don’t flaunt it on stage. I don’t hide anything.” Richie winced as soon as the words left his mouth, and he was glad that Eddie couldn’t see. He was in fact talking to the one person that he was hiding the most from. Maybe the turtle-dog had a point…

But their friendship meant everything to him, and to lose Eddie after just getting him back would destroy him.

In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to stay at the recently-divorced questionably-straight single-friend’s apartment that he had a lifetime’s long crush on, but when Eddie invited him over for a couple of weeks for a vacation there wasn’t a force on earth (or otherwise) that could have made him refuse.

(He really needed help.)

(But not the magic supernatural bullshit kind.)

“Okay,” Eddie said with a note of finality and decision. “Okay. I’ll get in touch with Mike and see what he knows. Mike’s good with this kind of stuff, right? Or maybe Bev? She got caught in the Deadlights like you. Wait, didn’t Stan say he saw some weird Deadlights shit too? Though I’m not sure Stan would let me get past ‘Richie got bit by a dream dog’ before he hung up on me.”

Richie laughed as he felt a wave of affection crash through his chest. Eddie was clearly out of his comfort zone with anything involving magic again, but he was being practical and logical and making plans. He had always been, and continued to be, the bravest man Richie had ever known.

“Tell him I got bit by a magic pigeon and he might stick around long enough to hear a bit more.” He stuffed the bloodied toilet paper into the toilet and wiped around the sink to get rid of any traces of red.

Eddie’s voice softened, “How’s your hand?”

Richie turned his wounded hand over and examined the puncture marks – now just angry red indents. But they still burned. “It’s not so bad now,” he said, “bleeding has stopped. Thanks, doc.”

“Well, we’re still taking you straight to the hospital. I’m going to get in my car now and I’ll meet you at the airport as soon as you land. Just… stay awake for the rest of the journey, okay?”

Richie wondered if Eddie was really smiling, or if he was just doing a good job of imagining it in his voice. He smiled back anyway and ran his good hand through his messy hair. “You got it. See you soon, Eds.”

“Don’t call me-”

Richie chuckled as he pressed the button to flush the toilet and hung up the call.

**Author's Note:**

> As always please join me on my tumblr [@Izupie](https://izupie.tumblr.com) ! My ask box is always open~


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